Friendship and Happiness

This ""philosophical"" look at friendship and happiness begins with a review of Aristotle's three categories of friendshipfriends of utility, friends of pleasure and friends of the good. Modern variationscasual friends, close friends, best friendsare described, along with the growing phenomena of virtual friendships and cyber socialization in the Internet age. Inspired in part by Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness, the authors propose that conquering unhappiness is key to achieving the self-satisfaction Russell called zest and Aristotle called eudaimonia or thriving by our own efforts.